The Solo 3 Wireless are built well, but not $300 well.

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They’re mostly made of plastic, feel just a bit flimsy around the earcups, and aren’t extraordinarily stylish. They look a lot like the Solo 2. That said, they’re light, and they can fold up to be very compact, which makes them easy to carry around.

I would call them comfortable, all told, but there’s room for doubt. The padding is fine, but they clamp down with just a bit more force than I prefer. After a couple hours of listening, I usually felt as if I needed to give my ears some air. At the same time, I have a big head, and others might appreciate how secure they stay on the move.

But the Solo 3's design does a great job with the audio controls.

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All the necessary pause, volume, and track skipping buttons are built right into the left earcup. If you’re hooked up to an iPhone, you can activate Siri as well. All of this is inconspicuous, but easy to press.

The earcups also contain a built-in microphone. It’s perfectly serviceable for taking calls or bossing Siri around, but not the clearest I’ve used.

The Solo 3 Wireless use Apple’s low-energy W1 chip, which comes with a few crucial benefits. First: pairing.

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If you have an iPhone, connecting the headphones wirelessly is dead simple. You just activate Bluetooth on your phone, turn the headphones on, and watch a little card pop up. Press “Connect,” and you’re golden.

So long as I turned Bluetooth on beforehand, this worked flawlessly each and every time. Other headphones have been able to pair quickly through things like NFC, but there’s less guesswork here. It feels like something that should be standard.

But it's only this easy on iOS. This isn’t surprising — with iPhones and iPads, Apple controls the whole stack. With Android or Windows, though, the Solo 3 Wireless connect like any other Bluetooth device.

In either case, the Bluetooth implementation is rock solid. Blips or drops in connection are few and far between. They can also hold a connection from dozens of feet away, thanks to their strong Class 1 radio.

The other big benefit of a low-energy wireless chip is battery life.

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Apple rates the Solo 3 Wireless as getting 40 hours of battery life, and provided you don’t constantly max out the volume, that’s just about right. For many, it’ll be a matter of weeks before you need a recharge.

The Solo 3 isn’t the first wireless headphone to approach this level of battery life, but the fact that it gets so much juice out of a smaller, on-ear frame makes me think the W1 let Apple use a slimmer battery to keep the weight down. Either way, it’s fantastic.

When you do need to recharge, there’s a quick charging feature that gives you around 10% of power after a few minutes of charging.

Beyond that, Beats throws a cable in the box — which ends in a 3.5mm connector, not a Lightning one. This is the right call, given that there are way more phones with headphone jacks than ones without them, but it’s amusing.

For years, Beats headphones were known for boomy bass and sloppy details. They were like listening to music in a fishbowl. But work has been done.

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The Solo 3 Wireless are still a bass-first headphone, without doubt, but they take that approach in a respectable way. They’re more “fun” than “bloated.”

Especially with hip-hop and electronica, the Solo 3 Wireless provide serious low-end impact. On a track like Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” the thing just grooves. There’s a good sense of dynamics throughout, but the whole thing feels smooth, not harsh. This is the kind of sound Beats was ostensibly made to achieve. It’s exciting to see the most popular headphone brand in the world come closer to reaching its potential.

Now, just because this sound is good for Beats doesn’t mean it’s good for you. The Solo 3 Wireless are not what I’d call balanced by any stretch — treble and high-mids are just less present, and everything could stand to be more spacious. Being a Bluetooth headphone doesn’t help it catch any more detail either.

Again, in a vacuum, it’s not $300 good. The purists of the world should still turn to their Sennheisers and Grados. But for a mainstream headphone made for mainstream interests, the Solo 3 Wireless certainly holds its own.

One downside, though, is that they leak sound easily. Turn up the volume beyond 50-60%, and you’ll reveal your playlist to everyone around you. These are not the things to crank on a flight.

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They aren’t the most isolating cans in the world, either. The lack of noise-cancellation can be excused, but you’ll still hear, let’s say, the sounds of a noisy subway station unless you set the volume loud.

Let’s be real: People will buy their Beats no matter what, just as they buy their iPhones no matter what.

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They’ll be overpriced, because that’s what successful brands with heavy marketing campaigns do. But the Solo 3 Wireless show that Apple and Beats aren’t just resting on their laurels: They’ve made serious gains in both connectivity and battery life, and the sound, while certainly not for everyone, is more than respectable.